Penitence
by brookemopolitan
Summary: The moments after Making Friends and Influencing People... Skye is freaking out over Ward's big revelation. Coulson is there when she needs to put down her baggage for a moment and be hurt. Cross posted at A03


Please be gentle... This is the first time in a very long time that an episode of TV has left me with a burning desire to write. I hope it doesn't go away.

This is completely unbetaed... all mistakes belong to me. I also own a Captain America sippy cup. I do not own AoS. If I owned AoS, Ward would have been a triple agent. Yeah...

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Breathe in. Breathe out. Repeat.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Repeat.

Skye didn't need to check her heart rate monitor to know that her pulse was still racing. She closed her eyes. The room was _not_ spinning. Everything was fine. She had acted appropriately according to the circumstances. There was a threat; she neutralised it. She couldn't allow Hydra to walk away with Donnie and it was critical that they maintain Simmons' cover. Skye had followed her training to a tee and did what had to be done. Ward was just trying to get under her skin. Surely, _surely_ he was lying. Her father couldn't be alive. Her parents had been killed when she was a baby.

She'd been so engrossed with her pep talk that she hadn't noticed that she'd been wringing her hands since she last checked her heart rate.

She couldn't stay standing in the corridor. Not when Mac was crowing like a pig in shit, happily taking an inventory of the goodies they'd swiped from Hydra. She needed to hide away and let herself crumble in solitude.

She missed her van. The thought almost brought a smile to her face.

She couldn't stay standing where she was, and there was no van to hide away in. Her hands itched. She couldn't bear look at them. Her stomach churning, Skye bolted towards the bathroom.

She managed to suppress the urge to throw up. She pushed away thoughts of her father… they were simply too difficult to face. She wished she could doubt Ward. She wished that she could lie to herself and chalk this up to just another Hydra deception and not give his claims another thought. Skye knew herself better than that. It was just a matter of time before she started digging into Ward's story. She didn't know what the hell she would find, but she could only guess with Hydra's history, it wouldn't be fun. So for now, she would shove it to the back of her mind and focus on something more immediate.

Like the fact that her hands were dirty.

The water was scalding hot. The soap on the BUS was the kind of antibacterial shit that melted your flesh off (Simmons' insistence, and the smell was so familiar they hadn't had the heart to change it after she went undercover). But her hands weren't clean. It didn't matter how many times she scrubbed, she could still feel the filth on her skin.

"Out, damned spot."

Skye nearly jumped out of her skin. She turned towards the doorframe. She should have known better than to think that a locked door would keep the Director of SHIELD out of a room he wanted to be in. She let out a mirthless chuckle. "You know, I actually didn't hate that play."

"I'm glad that tenth grade English made an impact on you," Coulson replied, walking over to the sink. He twisted the faucet til the water stopped. "You need to stop doing that."

Skye stared at the drain. "I'm not sure that I can," she answered after a long pause.

"Skye, stop. Don't do this," Coulson warned her.

"Do what?" She asked. "Donnie Gill is dead because of me. They can't even find his body. I did that. That's on me."

"You stopped him being used by Hydra. He didn't want that life. Now he never has to live with his choice being taken away from him."

Skye could only give him a mournful glare. There was so much she wanted to say, but she didn't know how to say it. Her world had been torn out from under her feet and she wanted it to go back to some semblance of normal… or at least, the semi organised chaos that she had existed in before.

The understanding look that Coulson gave her nearly split her soul in two. "What did May say to you?"

Skye sniffled. "Not much," she answered truthfully. "That I did well, in not so many words."

"Sounds like May," Coulson agreed. "What do you say?"

Skye was tired. Sleep deprivation had become the norm in their post-Hydra existence, but she was carrying a weariness that seeped deep in her bones. She was tired of carrying around her hurts. She wanted to put down her baggage, if only for a little while.

"I say that I wish Ward wasn't Hydra." The words shocked her. Skye thought she'd hidden that wicked, pervasive little dream locked in a deep, dark box, the key thrown far away. She never intended anybody else to ever know that secret.

It was the truth, though. She'd almost confessed that she taken a life for the first time when she'd marched down to Ward's cell. He would have known what to say. He would have put his concerned SO face on, and she couldn't afford to think of him like that, because then she'd start thinking of him as the Ward from before the fall of SHIELD and she couldn't bear to relive that heartbreak.

She stared at the hangnail on her thumb. She knew that if she saw the look on Coulson's face, the tears would start and she feared that once she started crying, she'd never stop.

"He was more than just your SO, wasn't he?"

Skye considered denying it. Considered pretending that he was nothing to her, the way that the team was to him. But Coulson had seen the footage of their escape from Providence. Lying wasn't going to make that video disappear. "Yup," she whispered. "It wasn't supposed to be like this."

"I'm sorry, Skye," Coulson murmured. "We should have seen this. I should have protected you."

"Not your fault, AC. He just told me that everything he did was of his own free will." That confession hurt the most, Skye mused. Diving out of a plane to save Simmons was done of his own free will. Nobody could have ordered him to do that. Nobody forced him to sleep in a chair that was three times too small for his muscular frame when Skye was recovering from two slugs to the gut. He wasn't ordered to pick up the Beserker staff to protect the team. He chose to do all of those things… the things that had made Skye lower the defences she'd spent a lifetime building and dare to hope for more. He'd chosen to be their defender, time and time again… Just like he'd chosen to shoot Victoria Hand in cold blood. To garrotte Eric Koenig. He chose to send FitzSimmons to the bottom of the ocean and his choices to follow a psychotic mentor had broken Fitz beyond repair.

It would be easier to hate him if he was just pure evil. She almost wished that he'd been as psychotic as Garrett, or even as opportunistic as Quinn. You could hate that without a gnawing at your soul. If he were a true believer, holding fast to his beliefs even as he rotted away in prison, Skye would have no problems holding on to her hate and her rage and wishing him dead. But when he looked at her like she was the only light in the dark… when he complied with her requests, promised her answers to questions she'd spent a lifetime asking; it made her want to believe him. It made her want him to be the guy she thought he was when she kissed him in a closet because she was determined to live without regret.

She wanted her grumpy SO back. She wanted to have that drink with him, and then she wanted to see where it went. She wanted him to be at her side… she wanted him to squeeze her shoulder and tell her that he understood the crawling of her skin after she'd taken that shot. She wanted the elation of hope back. And even more than she hated what Ward really was, she hated herself for wanting those things more.

"You went and saw him again, didn't you?" It wasn't a question. Skye only nodded.

"Sometimes I forget what he is. Talk to him like he's the person he was, instead of the traitor he is," she replied. She finally found the courage to look over at Coulson. "Apparently Hydra uses brainwashing where they can to gain their assets. That's what they did to Donnie. And I'm so scared they're going to try it on Simmons."

"But that's not what has you so freaked out," Coulson asserted, giving Skye a look that made it clear he knew he wasn't hearing the whole truth. There was something so deeply paternal about that look, Skye couldn't help but shiver.

"Ward claims my father is still alive, and he can take me to him."

Skye had been paying enough attention in her training with May to see that she'd managed to shock Coulson. He froze, before regaining control of himself. "And you believe him?" He asked.

Skye shrugged. "I don't know what to believe. He knows that finding my family is the one thing that I want more than anything. It makes sense that he'd use it against me. But he keeps claiming that he wants me to trust him and he won't lie to me. What would he gain by selling me this story, especially when he knows I'm going to treat everything he says as a lie anyway?"

"You want it to be true, don't you?" Coulson asked.

A lump rose in Skye's throat. Family… she'd been searching for the truth for as long as she could remember and now there was every chance it was just within her grasp. She forced herself to think of Providence and the gut-wrenching truth of Ward's allegiances. This _had _to be too good to be true. "I wish Ward wasn't Hydra," she repeated. "Because if he wasn't, I would have already left by now."

Coulson cleared his throat. "You know that even if Ward is right, and your father is out there, he's not your only family, right?" He asked. "You have a family, Skye. We're right here."

That did it. The tears that had been threatening to fall since she stepped out of the prison slipped down her cheeks. "I do know that," Skye answered, offering him a watery smile. "Thanks, AC."

He gave her that same fatherly look… it was a look that she'd longed to have someone give her since childhood. "Skye, if your father is out there, we'll find him, I promise. We don't have to involve Ward, especially if you don't want him involved. You're the one calling the shots on this. I'll follow where you lead."

Skye couldn't help the grin that spread across her face. "So if I said I wanted to hunt down _Dirty Dancing_ and eat the Chunky Monkey I left in the freezer for dinner, you'd join me on that?"

Coulson cringed. "How soon can I bring Simmons back?"

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